Charas-Project
Off-Topic => All of all! => Topic started by: Drace on December 08, 2005, 10:16:18 PM
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So, I got made my english bookreport. Yay! Well, not exactly. I made my summary 4 pages. Not a problem, but it is if I want someone to check it for me. So I ask in utter and complete beggingnis, please read it and notify me if there are some grammer or spelling mistakes.
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• The book starts in 2180 with Dave Lister, who is working as a taxi-driver of a Hopper, a vehicle that jumps over traffic, on Mimas, a moon of Jupiter. Lister ended up on Mimas after celebrating his 24th Birthday by binge drinking in London on a Monopoly board pub crawl. When he sobers up, he's somehow ended up on Mimas, with no money to get a shuttle ticket home. He picks up a man with a mustache who works at the Space Corps and takes him to a place to eat. After waiting 40 minutes outside, as the man asked him to do, he decides to go in and search for the man and finds out he’s in a brothel. After discovering the man, who denies everything, Lister drops him off at the shuttleport. There he blackmails the man for 100 Dollarpounds and notices that the man’s name is Arnold Rimmer. After his encounter with Rimmer, Lister decides to join the Space Corps himself in an attempt to get back on Earth. After a job-interview he’s been made Third Technician, the lowest rank on the ship. Mainly because they have a better union-bond. He is assigned to Red Dwarf, one of the older mining ships with a top speed of 200,000 mph and a crew of 11,169. This is where he first meets Olaf Peterson. However, Lister discovers that Red Dwarf will firstly be going to Triton and then to Earth, a journey that would take four and a half year long. When he boards Red Dwarfs he sees Holly for the first time. Holly is a computer with an IQ of 6000 and knows just about everything. After being escorted to his sleeping quarters he finds out he shares them with none other then Arnold Rimmer. Arnold told Lister that he was an officer back on Mimas, but he wasn’t. He was merely a First Technician and in charge of the Z-Shift, a maintenance shift that does the jobs that are considered a waste of time for the Skutters, small service droids. Mainly because the Skutters have a better union-bond. The next day he, Peterson and two others go to a disco to celebrate the revival, as a hologram, of a man who committed suicide to escape from his gambling depts. It’s also revealed that Peterson has bought a large mansion on Triton for 2000 Dollarpounds. The reason it’s so cheap is because there’s no breathable air there, so he’d have to float around in a space suit. While most people get up to dance, Lister sits at the table and watches them. Nobody knows that in seven months, they’ll all be dead.
Five months later, Lister has settled into the dull, monotonous routine of life aboard Red Dwarf. While he waits for Peterson to arrive so they can go for a drink, the reader is given insight into Rimmer's background. Born on Io, he is the youngest of four sons. His brothers have all had tremendous success in the Space Corps, partially at the behest of their mother, and that success fills Rimmer with jealous rage. His mother's low opinion of him has shaped his single desire: to become an officer. Despite his complete ineptness and lack of interest in the skills and subjects required to become an officer, he strives to pass the Astronavigation Exam - the prerequisite to become a Navigation Officer - which he has failed 12 times.
He usually fails because he actually hates studying, so devotes most of the three months before the exam constructing a timetable for studying, which normally leaves him with a week before the exam to cram three months of studying. At least once the resulting anxiety forced him to deny his own existence, so at the exam he wrote 'I AM A FISH' 500 times. As Rimmer continues to build his timetable, backed by his resolution that things will be different, Peterson arrives, and he and Lister goes for a drink. When they arrive, Lister catches sight of Kristine Kochanski for the first time. He falls madly in love with her instantly, and after a few attempts, he gets her to go on a date with him. For five weeks they go out, and Lister is madly in love with her. However, it's revealed that she was going out with a flight co-coordinator until he left her for somebody else, and was on the rebound when Lister met her. He'd come back to her, and she'd fallen in love with him again. For the next three weeks, three day’s planet leave on Miranda aside, Lister misses her deeply. While Lister goes off to try and get Peterson to have a drink, Rimmer finishes his revision for the night. He has resolved to actually studying, and his newest timetable only took two hours to make. He decides to spend the rest of the night in a Stasis Booth. Stasis Booths work by freezing time, so anything caught within the stasis field temporarily ceases to exist. The object stays in the same state and age until released, and it doesn't notice the passage of time. Rimmer uses it to slow his aging process, and has so far been able to save up a year using it. On the last day of his life, Rimmer pairs himself up with Lister to perform their Z-Shift duties. Shortly after 10:00, a rival First Technician named Petrovich arrives, and summons Lister to see the Captain. Before leaving, he asks Rimmer why he isn't at the Astronavigation Exam. Believing the Exam is still a month away, Rimmer runs back to his Sleeping Quarters, and discovers he included September twice on his timetable. With a month's worth of revision still to go, Rimmer opts to cheat, and copies as much of his textbooks onto his body as physically possible. Petrovich escorts Lister to the Captain's office. After finishing a phone call, she asks him about a cat. Lister plays dumb until she shows a photo that Lister took of himself and the cat. After refusing to hand over the cat, she sentences him to stasis for the remainder of the trip for breaking quarantine regulations. Meanwhile, Rimmer arrives at the exam room, an hour late. Because of his absolute fear of being caught cheating, he is convinced that the Examiner knows that he's cheating. He waits for half an hour, sweating profusely, for the examiner to do something about it, before deciding he doesn't actually know. Upon actually examining the exam, he realizes there are four of the five questions he can answer perfectly, meaning he would pass. However, when he looks at the answers he copied down, his earlier sweat has dissolved the writing, leaving an inky blob on his arm. He slams his hand on the answer paper, leaving a palm print, signs it and faints. Lister is escorted to a stasis booth by Petrovich. Petrovich gives him one last chance to surrender the cat, which Lister refuses. It transpires that Lister wants to enter stasis. With his relationship with Kochanski over, there is nothing left for him, so his original objective of returning to Earth becomes a priority. He discovered that Stasis Booths were used for punishment of a variety of rules, including breaking quarantine regulations. On his last day of planet leave on Miranda, he bought a high-pedigree cat named 'Frankenstein', and had her inoculated against every disease. He hid her in the ventilation system, which was too large to ever search properly. Lister reckoned three years wages was worth it to find himself instantly back at Earth. Lister couldn't have picked a better time to go to stasis, because one of the nuclear reactors aboard the ship begins to malfunction, and a combination of technical faults and at least one instance of human error means nobody notices it. Rimmer is given sick leave, and decides to spend it in a stasis booth. However, he decides to stop and comb his hair. This delay proves critical, as seconds before Rimmer would have entered a booth, the reactor reaches critical mass and unleashes its radioactive payload, rushing through the ship and killing everybody it encountered. Rimmer's last thought before it reaches him is of a bowl of Gazpacho Soup. He, and the rest of the crew, dies in seconds. This does not leave Red Dwarf lifeless, however, because Holly was able to seal the supply bay before any radiation reached there. In this place, Frankenstein and her new-born kittens are eating.
Upon release from stasis, Lister realizes how quiet everything is, and wonders where everybody is. Holly informs him that they're dead, explains what happened, and mentions how he has had to pilot Red Dwarf out of the Solar System, in case any radiation contaminated a planet. Holly couldn't release Lister until the radiation had reached a safe background level. However, because the Cadmium II which had leaked has such a long half life, Lister has been in stasis for 3,000,000 years. This, in conjunction with the possibility that he is the last human alive, drives Lister insane. He doesn't dress or eat and drinks whiskey constantly. After five days of this, Lister collapses, and wakes up in the medical unit to find Rimmer, now a hologram. The fact that he now has a companion, even if it is Rimmer, helps Lister cope with the situation and regain his sanity. A few days later, Lister tells Holly to turn Red Dwarf around and head back to Earth. Fully aware of the likelihood that mankind has long gone, Lister reckons that Earth is home, and there's really nowhere else to go. As he packs his few belongings in a vacuum trunk and prepares to re-enter stasis, Rimmer objects to the idea, on the grounds that if mankind has survived, he won't need to be switched back on. Lister berates Rimmer for going on about his death, and tells him to move on. In the midst of this argument Holly interrupts, telling them that, shortly after opening the radiation seals on the cargo decks, he senses a non-human life-form. Lister takes a Bazookoid, a weapon that fires a small blue ball that inflict an exploding damage on the target, and heads down the cargo decks with Rimmer. While taking the elevator down, Lister notices that halve of the food supplies have been eaten. The elevator is at the floor of the life-form and Lister and Rimmer go down to search it, finding a Felis-sapien, a 3-million year evolution of your average housecat. The whole race all descended from Frankenstein. The Felis-sapien looks very much like a human. The most obvious differences are the teeth, which are from a carnivore, and that they have 6 nipples. The Felis-sapien, or Cat, how he has been called after this event, have a long history with lots of wars about religion. There where two types religions. One group saying that God’s name is Cloister. The other group saying exactly the same, with the only different that they say that God’s name is Clister. After centuries of war about this they decide to head each follow their path to find the Promised Land. They build gigantic arcs out of everything they find and left, leaving the blind, the crippled, the wounded, the handicapped, the deaf and the stupid ones behind. Both arcs, which left in different directions, where never seen again. After a short while there comes a distress call from the Nova-5, a spaceship that has crashed on an ice-planet. The crew decides to go down as soon as possible after they discover that the only survivors are three good looking women. Upon arrival and greeted by Kryten, an android, they soon discover that the three women are dead, for 3-million years now. Kryten is devastated after hearing this, being in denial for all those years, and shuts himself down. The crew scavenge whatever they can and take Kryten and a device. After repairing Kryten, Lister asks about the device. What it is, what it does, how it works. After a long time he finally got all the answers he needed. The device was able to take him back in Earth in only three months. After going to a moon which contained it’s fuel they activate the device. The crew is back on Earth. Everyone takes their own path. Rimmer becomes famous and marries the most famous woman of the planet. Lister settles down in a town with Kochanski and has twin boys. And Cat disappears to Denmark. Months later, Lister’s arms hurt. He uses an ointment which reveals words on his arms. The first understands is ‘dying’, but he didn’t knew the meaning. Lister’s also starts to notice weird things, like one of his twin-sons of 15 months old taking the car to get some milk downtown and that it’s always Christmas-Eve. He decides to go to Rimmer. After talking to Rimmer for a while they conclude what’s on Lister’s arms. It says: ‘U r in btl dying’. Which translates: ‘You are in Better Than Life, and dying.’ Better Than Life is a virtual reality game, and it’s highly addictive. You’ll never know you’re in there and you’ll never leave, because you didn’t knew you where in there and if you did, life was to perfect to leave. After seeing Napoleon Bonaparte and Alexander The Great at a party in the Rimmer Hotel Paris, they both decide to go to Denmark and search for Cat. Rimmer isn’t convinced yet, but after finding out that Cat lives in a giant castle with many towers, a ditch around it filled with milk, many 6 foot tall women and Cat hunting dogs, Rimmer is convinced they’re in Better Than Life. With the help Kryten, who appears in Cat’s castle and explains everything, they get out of Better Than Life and continue their long journey back to Earth.
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Well, it's long, and I didn't read any of it, but toward the bottom you start a sentece with And. I dunno bout your school, but my school doesn't accept that.
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Noted and changed. "And Cat has disappeard in Denmark." is changed into: "As for Cat, he disappears into Denmark."
Any more?
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The other group saying exactly the same, with the only different that they say that God’s name is Clister. After centuries of war about this they decide to head each follow their path to find the Promised Land.
Head should be have.
They build gigantic arcs out of everything they find and left, leaving the blind, the crippled, the wounded, the handicapped, the deaf and the stupid ones behind.
That should be BUILT, not BUILD
After going to a moon which contained it’s fuel they activate the device
You need a comma between fuel and they.
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Originally posted by Meiscool
Well, it's long, and I didn't read any of it, but toward the bottom you start a sentece with And. I dunno bout your school, but my school doesn't accept that.
You can start a sentence with and, but most people don't do the right way, so it is discouraged.
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Might I suggest, Drace, people don't usually like big blocks of text like that. Try and fit more enters where applicible.
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Heh, it's to late now. Anyhoe, thanks for your help Me.
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Why'd you thank yourself? What about the rest of us?
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Originally posted by Meiscool
Well, it's long, and I didn't read any of it, but toward the bottom you start a sentece with And. I dunno bout your school, but my school doesn't accept that.
ah, in that particulair case, and wasnt a good idea.
But sometimes staring a sentence with and can amazingly be very effective, depending on the surrounding text of course.
Nice work Drace ^_^
I never saw you as a writer...just a critic :p